. . . because I have to say SOMETHING

Category Archives: Culture

Let me explain something about the First Amendment: Your right to free speech does not impinge upon my right to reject you.
It does not offer you anonymity.
It does not shield you from reprisal.
It does not compel me to listen to you or to grant you space.
It only prevents Congress from outlawing acts of speech. You can’t be jailed for what you say. You can nevertheless be held to account for your intentions.
Almost no one understands this.
Almost no one reads the Amendment.
History has been reduced to a matter of opinion.
Public education is an underfunded free-for-all of provincial attitudes.
College is dismissed as expensive and elitist. Knowledge has a liberal bias.
We are a nation taught primarily by video, all convinced of our own special genius.
We are dumber than our founders by a long shot.

We’re about to see a Presidential Cabinet where every single member will be a racist, sexist, climate-change denying, adulterous, felonious, lying old white man. Every decision they make will be based on a deadly combination of fear, ignorance, and arrogance. We will be one rash decision away from a nuclear holocaust.

All of the platitudes about “giving him a chance” and “working together” ignore the hostile reception that met our last President and the past eight years of obstructionism. All of the advice about organizing for the next election ignores the people who will have their marriages invalidated, who will lose their healthcare, who will be harassed and attacked, who will be separated from their families and deported, who will be forced to bear the children of their rapists, and who will die in the interim. Your white privilege is showing.

I live in the bluest state and it feels like another country entirely. I cannot relate to the issues of the great red middle of America, nor can the people there appreciate mine. While their political choices may make sense for them, I can only see the despair and death they bring to others. I cannot help but despise them for it.

Everything I was raised to believe about human decency, about truth-telling and ethical behavior, has been rendered idealistic rubble. I cannot see a way to re-enter my classroom with the optimism that carried me through my first fifty years of life. I cannot look my students in the eyes and tell them anymore that I believe in America.

I’m headed for my locker after a workout at the gym and a stranger is standing there, using the locker next to mine. I see her face, as I approach, transform into a mask of such disgust that it’s immediately clear to me just how terrible a monster she thinks I am. I smile and say hello anyway to break the tension. “Get away from me,” she sneers, looking down her nose at me. Does she think I’m a man? I’m a butch looking lesbian but I have breasts. I grab them and thrust them out at her. “I’m a woman! I have breasts!”

“SHUT THE HELL UP! DON’T TALK TO ME! DON’T COME NEAR ME! GET AWAY FROM ME! GET OUT OF HERE! GET THE HELL AWAY FROM ME! (as I pull everything that’s in my locker into my arms) “WHAT ARE YOU DOING? GET AWAY FROM ME! GET OUT OF HERE! GET THE HELL AWAY FROM ME!” (as I scramble to get as far away from her as possible).

Red-faced, I find another locker a few aisles away. I jam my things inside and hurriedly undress between two other women who are doing their best to ignore the situation. A moment later, I hear her address me from the front of the room: “YOU KNOW YOU REALLY OUGHT TO WATCH WHAT YOU SAY OR SOMEONE WILL THINK YOU’RE A MAN!”

She leaves and no one says anything. I head for the shower. I’ve got thirty-five minutes to get myself to class but I spend ten of them slumped against the tile wall, shaking as the water hits me.

I feel like a freak. A squadron of kamikaze thoughts attack me.

What the hell is wrong with me? Why do I scare other women?

Granted, she’s crazy, but this isn’t an isolated incident.

I can’t do this anymore.

She thought I was a man. She thought I was a rapist.

I don’t deserve this. I’m a kind, moral, decent human being.

I’m always getting read as male. I’m a masculine person. I can’t help it. I feel more male than female.

If I went on testosterone, would my life be easier, or harder?

Would I be changing into something that I’m not? Or becoming more of who I am?

I’m not a man. I wasn’t socialized as a man. I can’t erase the past forty-seven years of living in a female body and being treated like a woman. I might grow a mustache but I’ll never be a man. It’s too late for that.

I hate my body. I’ve always hated my body. I like who I am, though. I only want to change the outside.

I wouldn’t be a man. I’d be a transgender person. Someone who was born, raised, and spent an entire lifetime as a female who now finds it less painful to live in a male body.

Nothing about me will change but my body.

The people who already read me as male will be closer to being right.

I want my life to be easier. I want the pain to go away.

I could lose friends. I could lose my wife.

Women who’ve known me for years will look at me differently.

They’ll tell me to “man up” where before, they expressed sympathy.

They’ll accuse me of mansplaining even though I explain things for a living.

Things I said with safety as a lesbian will suddenly seem sexist. “How lucky am I to be surrounded by all of these beautiful women?” may not be heard in quite the same way.

I won’t change but expectations will. “Would you mind taking out the trash?” they’ll ask me. “Could you carry up that box?”

It still hits me over the head sometimes when I have a moment of shock and I think, “I really am a freak.” I’ve got a slew of friends and a paid therapist who consistently tell me how normal I am but hey, they all live in California. I know better; I’m from New York.

I spent my childhood struggling to be seen as normal (read: “like everybody else”) despite feeling trapped in a body and a role I despised. I didn’t look any different from the other girls but still, everyone could see that I was a masculine person in a girl’s body, which was not okay. The boys made fun of me: “To a girl who’s really built — like a Mack truck!” My sixth grade yearbook was littered with these. Even my friends took shots at me, paying the cutest boy in class to sneak up and kiss me on the cheek one day. “Where’s my two bucks?” he demanded, almost before his lips left my face.

Incidents like these aside, I really did and do feel normal most of the time – that is, until someone points out to me that I am not. Formerly, when I identified as a butch lesbian, I had a community and a history to fall back on at such moments. I never felt alone and, once I accepted myself, I never felt odd. There were so many others like me. Now that I identify as a transgender man, I feel utterly alone. There is no comparable community. There is no history. In terms of the medical options available to me, I am a new thing on this earth.

In my last post, I responded to the new North Carolina law that requires transgender people to use the restroom associated with the gender listed on their birth certificates. Some of us look so much like the men or women we identify as that following the law creates its own set of problems. No woman wants to see my mustached face in a ladies room.

The post elicited a strong response from a friend of mine; he’s not wrong in asking me to be realistic about the way politicians think:

“In the eyes of the NC legislators, who are older straight conservatives for the most part, there is a very real fear of perverts emboldened to barge into women’s restrooms AND LOCKER ROOMS [emphasis his] unrestrained. Whether that is a realistic fear or not is neither here nor there. It exists.”

I suppose I have to accept this. No amount of reason can shake an irrational belief. If men who try to look like women are allowed into the ladies room, then men will try to look like women in order to get into the ladies room. It doesn’t matter that it makes no sense; belief rarely does. And it’s strong enough to withstand critiques against its discriminatory effects.

The human psyche makes it acceptable to hurt other humans by dehumanizing them. In the eyes of the NC legislature, I am a freak, and freaks pave the way for rapists. As my friend implicitly reminds me, that’s a fact whether I accept it or not. I don’t want to be a freak.

I don’t want to be transgender. It was hard enough coming to grips with being a lesbian; being transgender is a whole other order of weird. How messed up am I, to be so at odds with my own biology? What went wrong in my head or in my life to detach me so completely from my body? No matter what I do, I can never be a “real” man. It’s crazy to think otherwise. I need to deal with reality.

Reality’s a funny thing, though. It keeps changing. It turns out that being transgender is not the same thing as being a man. It doesn’t try to be. It occupies its own legitimate place along the spectrum of human biology and identity. Whether people understand it or not is neither here nor there. It exists.

Something happened in my brain, in the womb or early on, that created disagreement with my body. And while I laid claim to masculine style and identity a long time ago, the disappointment of a mirror has always been profound. Finally denial was more painful than acceptance. Forty-five years of self-hatred is more than enough for anyone.

A friend of mine recently moved her young family to Asheville, North Carolina. After a decade of struggling alone with two kids in a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco, she gave up whatever cultural advantages living there might afford them for a 2200 sq. ft. house in the woods. I don’t blame her. She and her children will undoubtedly have a better quality of life there, provided their SF values don’t collide head-on with their new NC reality.

Their move wasn’t just a leap from urban to rural, but from Democratic into Republican territory. My friend, a secular Jew originally from NYC, took comfort in Asheville’s reputation as a progressive oasis in an otherwise conservative state. Besides, the Supreme Court had already made gay marriage the law of the land, so how bad could North Carolina be? It’s the 21st century, after all.

My poor friend; she has my sympathy. I wish I could visit to offer her some emotional support, but I wouldn’t have anywhere to urinate. North Carolina has just passed a law requiring transgender people to use the public restrooms that correspond to the gender they were assigned at birth, regardless of how they identify. It’s clear that lawmakers weren’t thinking about how transgender people look, because I’d scare the crap out of everyone if I walked into a women’s restroom. And there are (need I tell you?) scores of incredibly gorgeous transwomen whom I’m sure many people don’t want too close to their husbands in the men’s room.

The practical effect of bathroom laws like this one is to divide the trans community into those of us who can and can’t “pass” as members of the gender with which we identify. If nobody can tell I’m trans, then I’m good to go, literally. No one is going to look twice at me. But if I can’t or don’t particularly want to be invisibly transgender, then I’d better start wearing adult diapers when I’m out and about in North Carolina.

What is all the bathroom panic among so-called “straight” people about? What’s wrong with their dirty little minds? I can’t help but wonder if the terrible childhood experience that made them straight in the first place is the same one that made them so afraid of restroom rape? Maybe we should think about getting rid of diaper changing stations in public bathrooms? Is that it? What on earth is the shared trauma of youth that makes these people neurotic to the point of enacting completely unjustified, blatantly discriminatory legislation?

Paranoid heterosexuals claim to be concerned that if transgender folks have legal access to the correct toilet, then straight men will disguise themselves as transwomen in order to get into the ladies room and rape women. This is championship-level convoluted reasoning: Let’s deny transgender women rights in order to keep straight men from raping straight women. Huh?

As for rape in the women’s restroom, outside of lesbian erotica, I’ve never heard of it happening. Committing a crime so publicly invites interruption and capture. Moreover, if it’s a realistic possibility then I have no idea what stops any rapist from dressing up as a woman and hitting the ladies room right now, regardless of the status of transgender rights. I don’t get the connection. The fact is that transwomen who are forced to use the men’s room as a result of misguided laws like this one will be the people who are most at risk of rape — again, by so-called “straight” men.

In refusing to protect the rights of transgender individuals, the North Carolina legislature appears to have taken a stand against something it’s genuinely afraid it can’t control: Themselves.

My wife and I are out shopping for a floor lamp; I’ve got a little condo close to my job that I’ve slowly been furnishing. Wandering from store to store in San Francisco, I reflect, when we are alone together in our car, on what an interesting contrast the experience has been relative to the past. Navigating the world as a heterosexual couple is a markedly different from moving through it as two lesbians. I’ve spent a lot of time recently, I tell her, just browsing through stores, watching the way salespeople react to me. Things have definitely changed.

“What do you mean?” she asks, a bit incredulous.

“I’m getting all this male privilege all of a sudden. I get read as a man and it’s a totally different interaction.”

“Like how?”

“You know that laptop I bought a few weeks ago? I got it for half the price that was marked on it. It was open box merchandise, so I told the guy, ‘I don’t really need it. I can walk away. I already have a laptop. I’m just here to see if I can get a deal.’ So he asks me, what do I want to pay? ‘Half that price,’ I say, and he disappears for a minute. When he comes back, he’s like, ‘Okay, we can do that.’ I couldn’t believe it.”

“You think it’s because he thought you were a man?”

“Absolutely. I mean, ‘What do you want to pay?’ Are you kidding me? That’s crazy. No one’s ever asked me that in a store before.”

I’m not sure she’s buying it, but she shrugs her shoulders and we move on. It’s the end of the day and we’ve been in a dozen different shops. In the very last store I see it: the ideal chair at the ideal price. It’s marked down 30% and we’ve got five minutes til closing time and the end of the three-day sale. The staff are moving through the store removing all of the price tags. Just as I’m about to say yes to the “sale” price marked on the tag, I notice that the crossed out, “compare at” price is actually half of the so-called “sale” price. I can’t believe my eyes; someone has a made a mistake.

A salesman is pulling off tags a couple of feet away from me. “Hey,” I say, getting his attention, “the ‘compare at’ price is lower than the ‘sale’ price! Are you guys gonna give me the chair for that?”

He walks over and looks at the tag. “Wow,” he says, “you’re right. I’m sorry, sir. Let me get the manager.”

A woman approaches and he explains the situation. She, too, examines the tag. I ask her, “Are you gonna give me the chair for the lower price marked on the tag?”

“I suppose I’ll have to, sir.”

I’m stunned. I fully expected her to laugh at the question and brush it off, but no. She looks at the man, “Will you help the gentleman with the chair?” and heads back to the register to let me pay. The salesman looks at the tag again, his body language broadcasting something like defeat. “I’m sorry, sir. It’s the last day of the sale and no one saw that.” I have no idea why he’s apologizing. I feel like I just hit the chair lottery.

I pay for the chair and he loads it into our car with a lot of effort and almost no assistance from me. In my defense, my arm is in a cast, recovering from bone surgery. The salesman, for his part, keeps addressing me as if I’m his boss and I’m about to fire him as he struggles to get the too-big chair into our smallish car. “I’m sorry, sir. Just a minute, sir.” Why does he keep apologizing? Is it because I’m white and he’s Latino? Is it because I’m wearing a jacket and tie? Is it because he wants a bigger tip? I’m uncomfortable in any event.

When I met my wife, she was already a homeowner and used to taking care of things by herself; some would say self-sufficient, others might say a mild control freak. I learned early on to leave her to her projects. She might mutter her way through fixing the sink but she’d get it done just fine without me. After 14 years of living together, I got a small place closer to my job to spend a few nights a week. Until I started working on it, she had no idea that I had any skills at all.

Unlike me, Tess is a master of all trades. She can build a fence, lay a floor, and put up dry wall. There’s very little to be done around the house that requires outside assistance. You wouldn’t know it to look at her, about a hundred pounds of hummingbird energy in a pencil skirt and heels, but she’s a one-woman Amish barn raising. She and her ex bought and renovated, by themselves, a series of increasingly more valuable homes which gave her a lifetime of know-how that I don’t possess. I leave things to her.

Our gas fireplace, which burns out some part or other with clockwork regularity each year around Christmas, is one of the few things that she can’t fix. We call a service tech, typically a guy thick with grease who likes fire enough to make me feel grateful that he channels his energy legally. Tess made the call this year and since I wasn’t at home when he came out to the house, he dealt exclusively with her. When Mark came back the second time, I happened to be at home.

I was in the back of the house when I heard him come in. He spoke with Tess for at least five solid minutes before I emerged and from that moment on, he spoke mostly to me. My wife was instantly demoted to the status of a semi-responsible teenager while I was promoted to man of the house. He related to me like I knew more than she did about operating the dangerously explosive gas bomb formerly known as our fireplace; it was my responsibility to make sure that she didn’t blow herself up with it. I felt this extension of male privilege immediately and was offended on her behalf; I made a mental note to apologize to her as soon as it was over.

I followed Mark to the fireplace at the back of the house. It was the first time I’d had an interaction longer than a minute or two alone with a man who perceived me not just as another man, but as a husband. I felt him drop a rucksack of masculine responsibility onto my back.

He lay down on the floor to better access the control panel as I stood over him. I’d already noted that he was at least six inches taller than me, so this situation inverted our perspective. He initiated a conversation which wavered between two disparate themes: Make sure your wife doesn’t kill herself with the fireplace and, to distill it down to its essence, a guy can only take so much from another guy before he gets physically violent, even if the other guy is his brother.

“I love him,” he said, “he’s my brother. But there’s only so much. . . I mean, if a guy just dicks you over and over at some point you gotta take that motherf—er by the balls and slam him into a wall.”

“Just break him in half,” I agreed, hoping it sounded like something another dude would say. “I get it.”

“I mean,” he went on, “it’s one thing to f— me but when you start f—ing with my family I gotta deal with it, right?”

This went on for as long as it took him to do whatever he was doing and establish that he’ll need to come back again.

“How much time do you spend back here?” he asked, which struck me as a funny way to establish how long I could wait for the part to come in. “Can you live without it for a month? I mean, you don’t want her to turn this thing on and. . .” he trailed off, miming a mini explosion with his hands.

“No, no, no,” I insisted, “we’re fine. No problem. We don’t need to turn it on. Other ways to heat the house, dude.” In other words: I have it under control, Mark.

We rejoined Tess in the kitchen. She stood beside me as he summarized his points before leaving, addressing me exclusively. At some point I burst out: “You can tell her too, you know. She’s smarter than I am,” but he continued unfazed; something in his eyes made me think my statement was dismissed as sex insurance for later.

As soon as he left, I embraced my wife and apologized deeply. “I am so, so, sorry. I really am just so sorry.”

“For what?” I was shocked at her surprise.

“That disgusting male privilege. The way he talked only to me as if you weren’t there. I’m sorry.”

“Oh, that?” she shrugged. “I don’t care about that. You can be in charge of that.” And she bounced off, relieved that she has one less thing to worry about.

Now I’m looking into disaster preparedness. Apparently that’s what men do here.

I’m waiting in Starbucks for my drink to come up. Two women in their twenties are standing close enough to each another to be read as a couple. They’re dressed in complete agreement, entirely in black with toothpick jeans and wool sock hats, broadcasting androgyny. My inner taxonomist labels them butch lesbians; versions of my younger self, were I as free to be out then as they are now.

I think to myself: I laid the groundwork for their visibility.

In 1994, the Gay Games were held in New York City. The competition, which drew tens of thousands of people from all over the world, coincided with the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. Between the two events, there were literally hundreds of thousands of people in attendance at the NYC Gay Pride March that year. Volunteers carried a mile-long rainbow flag down 1st Avenue past the United Nations building. Uncharacteristically hilly for NYC, 1st Avenue crested at one point, offering me an expansive view of the crowd of which I was part. Behind me and in front of me, stretched to the ends of the visible horizon, lay a jam-packed sea of people. I’ve never seen so many people, not before or since.

We weren’t marching for gay marriage back then; we were marching for our lives. My twenties happened during the age of AIDS, back when HIV was a death sentence so harsh that people committed suicide upon being diagnosed. So many men were dying horrible, ugly, drawn-out deaths. The women among us had lost fathers, brothers, uncles, friends, and lovers. Prior to AIDS, there was no bond between the gay and lesbian communities; the HIV/AIDS crisis drew everyone together, all of the sexual outsiders, into one giant LGBTQ movement. We were compelled by necessity to unite in order to bring the strength of numbers to bear on the fight for our civil rights.

When I came out as a lesbian in 1989, I accepted the facts as they were at the time: I would never be married and I would never have children. If I wanted to work for the government or the military or become a teacher, then I would have to stay in the closet. Any employer could decide to fire me or not hire me in the first place, and any landlord could decide not to rent to me. Moreover, when I dared to be identifiable as a lesbian in public, I was subject to verbal and physical abuse. There were times when I feared for my safety. There were states where it was literally illegal for me to make love to my partner. I had no right to visit her, let alone make any decisions on her behalf, if anything tragic happened to her. All of this paled in comparison, of course, to the friends I was losing to AIDS; that fight took precedence.

If AIDS were still a plague in America, then the movement would never have graduated to demanding marriage equality. Marriage by its very nature assumes that a couple has a future together; back then, too many people were dying too young for any of us to be thinking about a future. We marched, we protested, and we took care of each other. We wore rainbows and freedom rings and we outed ourselves at every opportunity just to show the country that everyone knew and loved at least one of us. Famous people came out – Congressman Barney Frank in 1987, Sir Ian McKellen and Sir Elton John in 1988, k.d. lang in 1992, Melissa Etheridge in 1993, Ellen DeGeneres in 1997. Ellen’s show was cancelled shortly after she came out but within a year, the insanely popular Will and Grace began its eight year love affair with America and we got used to seeing gay men on a weekly basis. None of this would have happened if we had never come out in the first place. If we didn’t rise up and demand our rights then, we wouldn’t be enjoying them now.

Those two young women in the Starbucks may be blissfully unaware of this history. If that’s my generation’s gift to them, and the gift of the generation of activists who came before me, then so be it. It was enough once in a while to get a nod of acknowledgement, just to be seen.

I didn’t decide to be transgender any more than I decided to be 5’7″. These are facts of my life that are more constructive to accept than to deny. The only decisions that I’m consciously making are around the details of my physical transition. Step by step, I’m figuring out how much I need to change my body in order to be at peace with myself.

The first decision that I made – whether or not to begin taking testosterone – was incredibly difficult. I considered it carefully for a good part of my life. As I drew closer to moving forward with it, I specifically sought out anti-transitioning points of view. I searched terms like “testosterone side effects” and “FTM regret.” I read blogs and watched videos posted by older transmen who were in committed relationships or had well-established careers. I was looking for people with whom I could identify. I wanted to know if any of them felt they had made a mistake by transitioning.

I found a lot of anti-transitioning websites, but none of them were produced by people who identified themselves as transgender. Every negative point of view came from an outsider or from someone who had begun transitioning and later realized they were not actually transgender. Genuinely transgender guys were incredibly positive about transitioning. The problems in their lives had nothing to do with testosterone. The only regret they expressed was that they didn’t transition sooner.

There are many websites devoted to trashing FTMs. Some are run by feminists who see transmen as traitors to the sisterhood, capitulating to the patriarchy by co-opting male privilege while reinforcing stereotypical gender roles. In other words, people who identify as male despite being assigned female at birth (AFAB) are really women who have bought into their own subjugation – perpetuated by men – and turned it into self-loathing. As a result, they give up on being women and defect to the enemy side. This strikes me as an aggressively uninformed dumpload of feminist philosophy-cum-psycho-babble that has absolutely nothing to do with and no respect for the lived experience of transmen.

I was stunned to find some very hateful blogging by lesbians who have had terrible experiences with FTM partners. Perhaps they were unfortunate enough to fall into the crosshairs of an emotionally unhealthy or just flat-out nasty partner who also happened to be transgender? All of the ills and errors committed by that person were automatically attributed to the effects of testosterone, as if there were a direct cause-and-effect relationship between a doctor-administered medication and an individual’s abusive or otherwise shameful behavior. More than one angry ex-lover has given testosterone credit for everything from adultery to a sudden change in her partner’s sexual orientation. No drug is that strong.

Transmen have the same family conflicts, medical and psychiatric challenges that everyone else does in addition to, not as a consequence of, being transgender. We deal with our adoptive, or bitterly divorced, or deceased, or dying parents; our stacks of bills and our empty bank accounts; our chronic or serious illnesses; and all of the regular stresses of life. Like so many others, we struggle with issues of abuse, abandonment, addiction, and self-hatred, but as a group, we’re disproportionately more subject both to self-harm and abuse by others. Transitioning solves only one very specific problem.

Some bloggers warn that testosterone makes transmen angry and violent, but the medical protocol ensures that transgender men have testosterone levels within the normal range for cisgender men. Are men typically angry and violent? The answer to that question depends a lot on your point of view. They are certainly stereotyped as such. Do transmen then, – men via medicine – fall under the same rubric? Moreover, if a man expresses anger, do we attribute it to his hormones? No. We address the situational cause of his ire. Transmen, however, frequently have their legitimate anger dismissed as “the testosterone.”

More than one blogger warns that testosterone makes people who were formerly lesbians promiscuous to the point of having sex with men. If that’s really the case, then it has a great future as a date-rape drug. It’s far more likely that the shift in sexuality – if there even was one – was triggered by the rush of libido that comes with finally loving your own body. The incredible sense of liberation that people in transition sometimes feel can bleed over into other aspects of life. Once you open yourself to transitioning, many formerly impossible things start to look doable.

I’m sad that there is so much bad information out there about testosterone and how it allegedly turns lesbians into terrible little pseudo-men. I’m angry at the bloggers who feel the need to scare the crap out of some very sad and desperate people by telling us that we’re pawns of the medical industry. My identity is not open to your critique.

Let this post serve as my testimony that testosterone isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It’s been six months so far and no monstrous evil has emerged. If anything, I’m happier and more relaxed than ever, which makes me a better partner to my wife and a better stepparent to her children. Now that my energy isn’t being drained by sadness and anger, I’m finding the time for this blog and many other things worth pursuing, including friendship.

For the first time in my life, I’m looking forward to my future. Blame that on the testosterone.

Dining at a restaurant with family and the friends to whom I have just been introduced, the waiter calls me “Sir;” is it more mortifying to ignore his mistake or to point it out by correcting him?

Visiting my mother in the hospital, I oblige the woman in the other bed by moving a chair across the room. She smiles at my mom and says, “My, what a strapping young son you have!”

Heading into the women’s fitting room at Macy’s with an armload of clothing from the men’s department, the attendant shakes her head at me and points me back the way I came.

Every time this happened, I was wounded to the core. Even my wife couldn’t understand this. If I dressed in men’s clothing, wore short hair and no make-up, then why did it upset me when people thought I was a man? Because there is more than one way to be a woman, I’d explain. Because I still have a woman’s body and a woman’s face. Why can’t they see that?

I am stunned at my own lack of self-awareness. Or capacity for denial.

These strangers saw me for the man that I am. They saw him not just in my clothing and my haircut, but in everything from the way that I walk to the words that I choose. My bearing, my communication style, my naturally deep voice; all of it reads “male” and they saw it. Every social interaction threatened to reveal me to myself.

I identified as male from the moment that I understood the difference between men and women. I was disabused of this notion almost immediately upon arriving at it. Nonetheless, I persisted throughout childhood in my distaste for anything remotely identifiable as feminine. I eventually identified as a lesbian because it was the only way that I could see forward. It allowed me to fulfill my romantic and sexual attraction to women; to be decidedly masculine while housed in a female body; and to pursue a career (at the time) in a field dominated by men.

I was angry, though, because I felt an obligation to confess my birth sex to whoever got it wrong. My sense of honor and honesty compelled me to infer the presence of genitals with which I did not identify and acknowledge a gender role that I had rejected. It drew my attention to the uncomfortable incongruence between my biological sex and my gender identity. It brought a subliminal suffering to the surface.

It took me 49 years to move through this morass to the following conclusion: I don’t have to be unhappy. I’ve learned that the lifelong argument between my body and my mind has a biological foundation and a medical solution. I’ve learned that I’m not crazy. I’m not wrong inside. I’m wrong outside, and I’m fixing it.

Now I use the men’s room and – forgive the pun – it’s an incredible relief.